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Happy Axiom customer here. Its main selling point: absolute ease of use. Like a point-and-click selenium. Our analysts , who are doing quick analytics or analyt

Happy Axiom customer here. Its main selling point: absolute ease of use. Like a point-and-click selenium. Our analysts , who are doing quick analytics or analytics without the need for a long-term engineered solution, are very satisfied with it. I find it powerful enough for production use (it works with IG and even FB to some extent). Only downside I can think of: pricing is a bit opaque, outside the “desktop” license.

yaseer 6y ago
Hey, thanks! Yeah, so pricing is opaque because in all honestly, we're still figuring things out. We're unlikely to lift pricing and annoy users. If anything, we're extending the free trial for most users, and may introduce a cheaper tier too.
- shireboy 6y ago
  Cheaper tier would be great. I can think of some things I could use this for that are not 50$/mo things. Scraping personal finance, automating personal blog etc. but I definitely understand a startup needing to figure out pricing
  - yaseer 6y ago
    Cool, by way of a quick survey on HN, how much would you pay in a cheaper tier?
    - dotancohen 6y ago
      You're not asking me, but if home users are a target market then it would have to be $1 - $3 dollars per month. I could imagine scraping local events websites, banks, maybe online auctions, etc. When home users subscribed to one or two services, we could get away with $10 monthly. Now, with home users accustomed to $1 apps and subscribing to a dozen different services, $3 is about the maximum before signups drop significantly.
      - yaseer 6y ago
        On a public forum the question was open to anyone - thanks for sharing your thoughts! There does seem to be a strong argument to introduce a cheaper tier for consumer use-cases.
        p0sixlang 6y ago
        You could charge based on some metric of use, as opposed to an all you can eat style charge. $50 is very prohibitive if I used this to automate a task that'll earn me $20/month.
        yaseer 6y ago
        There's definitely going to be a usage based metric to pricing in the long-run. The problem now is that the obvious metric ('bot runs') is too crude for a DIY bot-builder, and may stop users during development. It's very likely our pricing system will evolve to resemble zapier's multiple tiers - they have the closest business model to ours. We're basically "The Zapier of RPA".
      - soneca 6y ago
        I would say it is impossible to make any business model work charging $1 to $3 per month.
        vntok 6y ago
        $3/mo is $36/year, most templates on themeforest and other platforms are around that price and they are selling fine. Considering the code is running on the user's side, the marginal cost for low-tier customers is probably minimal.
        dotancohen 6y ago
        Though I disagree with "impossible" I will mention that those $1 - $3 customers will likely have an order of magnitude more support costs. Business users will be people who can figure things out. Home users ask constant questions and require constant babysitting.
    - ukulele 6y ago
      If you're considering a really low price point like $5/mo, you might be better suited charging businesses more and then having a free tier that's restricted to personal use in some way (e.g. license or no collaboration)
  - shostack 6y ago
    +1 for personal finance. If I could use this to build my own Mint in a Google Sheet, or scrape Mint, and do so in a manner that did not introduce additional security issues beyond what I'd face writing my own Selenium scraper, I'd pay $5-$10/mo for this and know others who would as well. Bonus if output was consumable via API.

yaseer 6y ago

Hey, thanks! Yeah, so pricing is opaque because in all honestly, we're still figuring things out. We're unlikely to lift pricing and annoy users. If anything, we're extending the free trial for most users, and may introduce a cheaper tier too.

shireboy 6y ago
Cheaper tier would be great. I can think of some things I could use this for that are not 50$/mo things. Scraping personal finance, automating personal blog etc. but I definitely understand a startup needing to figure out pricing
- yaseer 6y ago
  Cool, by way of a quick survey on HN, how much would you pay in a cheaper tier?
  - dotancohen 6y ago
    You're not asking me, but if home users are a target market then it would have to be $1 - $3 dollars per month. I could imagine scraping local events websites, banks, maybe online auctions, etc. When home users subscribed to one or two services, we could get away with $10 monthly. Now, with home users accustomed to $1 apps and subscribing to a dozen different services, $3 is about the maximum before signups drop significantly.
    - yaseer 6y ago
      On a public forum the question was open to anyone - thanks for sharing your thoughts! There does seem to be a strong argument to introduce a cheaper tier for consumer use-cases.
      - p0sixlang 6y ago
        You could charge based on some metric of use, as opposed to an all you can eat style charge. $50 is very prohibitive if I used this to automate a task that'll earn me $20/month.
        yaseer 6y ago
        There's definitely going to be a usage based metric to pricing in the long-run. The problem now is that the obvious metric ('bot runs') is too crude for a DIY bot-builder, and may stop users during development. It's very likely our pricing system will evolve to resemble zapier's multiple tiers - they have the closest business model to ours. We're basically "The Zapier of RPA".
    - soneca 6y ago
      I would say it is impossible to make any business model work charging $1 to $3 per month.
      - vntok 6y ago
        $3/mo is $36/year, most templates on themeforest and other platforms are around that price and they are selling fine. Considering the code is running on the user's side, the marginal cost for low-tier customers is probably minimal.
      - dotancohen 6y ago
        Though I disagree with "impossible" I will mention that those $1 - $3 customers will likely have an order of magnitude more support costs. Business users will be people who can figure things out. Home users ask constant questions and require constant babysitting.
  - ukulele 6y ago
    If you're considering a really low price point like $5/mo, you might be better suited charging businesses more and then having a free tier that's restricted to personal use in some way (e.g. license or no collaboration)
- shostack 6y ago
  +1 for personal finance. If I could use this to build my own Mint in a Google Sheet, or scrape Mint, and do so in a manner that did not introduce additional security issues beyond what I'd face writing my own Selenium scraper, I'd pay $5-$10/mo for this and know others who would as well. Bonus if output was consumable via API.